Social networks

One out of two Internet users on the planet is part of a social network. Facebook, the indisputable leader of social networking, claims to have over a billion users! That’s nearly one out of seven human beings living on earth! We get questions about social networks every day. Some business leaders and managers are even focusing all their efforts and budgets on them. So should your company be present on most of the social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+…)? The answer is simply yes. Should it be your main concern? The answer is a simply NO!

The main goal of a company, a commerce or even a freelance professional is to have a very good website. Your website reflects your real corporate image. It can be an amazing productivity tool and can boost your sales and customer service. We will dedicate a full article about websites and their importance for a business.

But let’s get back to social networks and how you can make use of them to increase your visibility, your sales and stay in touch with your customers. The major social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Google+. Each of these networks has its distinctive characteristics.

Social Networks

Facebook is the primary one, but it’s importance is always overestimated by most business owners. They always tend to forget that most of their followers are already their customers and will be visiting their website if they need information or if they need to shop. Facebook is a great tool for individuals but not very efficient for businesses. Any information published on it will last at best few hours! The common mistake would be to try to write many posts every day hoping that a few of them will reach the users, but this will simply drive them to click on “unsubscribe” and the follower is lost for good. This means that using it as a promotional tool is not the most effective. Of course, depending on the type of business you are doing, this can be more or less true. But whatever your situation is, you must weigh the investment in time and human resources and the new business that Facebook is bringing in.

Twitter is a very simple yet powerful tool for businesses. Due to the limit of 140 characters by post, it is very efficient to send quick information to your followers. It is typically used to send short info and links to real corporate web pages. Again, over posting will annoy the followers and will drive them to unsubscribe from your feeds.

LinkedIn is very different from Facebook and Twitter. Its primary objective is to link individuals and corporation together, and is used by headhunters and human resources teams. It is a very efficient network to find the right staff or the right job and we encourage all business owners and individuals to use it. We may be dedicating this page to social networks but we can never insist enough on the importance of having in your teams the right staff. You can have the best ideas, the best services, the best products, but if you fail to have the right people, you are sure to fail in your business.

My Space was the leader in social networking for many years. But with the arrival of Facebook, it started loosing all its users. It is unfortunately probable that it will not survive for a long time. The company until 2009 used to employ 1600 workers. They are only 200 now! We will simply advise you not to invest much effort and time in building your image on this dying network.

Last but not least, the relatively new Google+, which is claiming about one hundred million users. Of course, these figures are to be handled very carefully as they are published by Google and they may be overestimated. Still, Google+ is a very promising social network and will benefit from the huge success of Android smart-phones and tablets. Google staff did a great job of learning from the flaws of Facebook and came up with a clear interface and a simple yet feature packed tool. We recommend that business owners start having an interest in this network and profit from its innovative tools.

Of course, we can write pages and pages on the subject and we will never cover all the social networks out there on the Internet.
It is down to every business owner or leader to determine, which of these tools is the best suited for their type of business.

We will help you with this and create and/or develop your campaigns for you.